Libraries Won’t Disappear, But What About Us?

By | October 21, 2014

This week’s readings explored how libraries are seeking to define themselves both conceptually and spatially in an increasingly digitized (and stratified) society. In a world where many of us carry around devices that can instantly connect us to an infinite amount of information and still others lack basic internet access (including over 40% of Brooklyn households!), the role of the library is a tough one to pin down.
While its easy to get anxious about the fate of libraries, or even their sometimes dismal current state, there are still many reasons to be optimistic. Offering both comfort and context Matthew Battles & Jeffrey Schnapp remind us that, “The intertwined acts of preservation and production that libraries enable are of a different scale and order. They unfold not over days and weeks and years, but over centuries and millennia.” Indeed, to suggest that physical libraries will soon be obsolete, is to take an extremely narrow historical view of their purpose and contribution to society.
Still Shannon’s two great articles remind us that libraries today can’t rely on tradition as a buffer from a rapidly changing society. What stood out to me most from these pieces, was the way that changing notions of “public” are in fact driving deeper existential questions for the library. For example, what does it mean for libraries when societies turn to DIY because we lack faith and/or the ability to enact change in our political system? How do growing digital and economic divides affect our affinity and thus responsibility for these knowledge institutions? And what role can or should these spaces play as we increasingly retreat to the confines of the web to satisfy our information needs?
The digital/analog opposition, computers vs. books, is an important issue, but one that I feel sometimes overshadows larger questions around community, participation and place. If to some degree we don’t believe our books are going to disappear anytime soon, could we think more about the effects of our rapidly disappearing sense of public? In Shannon’s piece, “Library as Infrastructure”  she quotes the University of Michigan’s Kristin Fontichiaro who says,“Their narrative — or what I’d call an ‘epistemic framing,’ by which I mean the way the library packages its program as a knowledge institution, and the infrastructures that support it — “must include everyone.” I strongly agree, as Shannon notes, that we need to “broaden the library’s narrative to include everyone, not only the ‘have-nots,’” so that these don’t become further marginalized places and hope “everyone” else does too!

One thought on “Libraries Won’t Disappear, But What About Us?

  1. shannon Post author

    Lots of highlights here, Laura. I’m going to identify just a few passages that I think would make for great discussion in today’s class:
    * “to suggest that physical libraries will soon be obsolete, is to take an extremely narrow historical view of their purpose and contribution to society”
    * “what does it mean for libraries when societies turn to DIY because we lack faith and/or the ability to enact change in our political system? How do growing digital and economic divides affect our affinity and thus responsibility for these knowledge institutions? And what role can or should these spaces play as we increasingly retreat to the confines of the web to satisfy our information needs?” — FABULOUS questions
    * Broadening the library’s narrative include everyone — not just the disenfranchised — “so that these don’t become further marginalized places and hope “everyone” else does too!”

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